Case Study: Withings Takes Efficiency to the Next Level with Instrumental

Perry Coneybeer

May 29, 2018

Withings had just been acquired by Nokia and was about to enter DVT of its new sleep tracker, Sleep, when they engaged Instrumental. The industry standard DVT takes between five and twenty business days, but Withings planned to do their entire DVT build in one day. Powering through DVT speeds up time to production, but leaves the team with very little time to iterate if anything goes wrong. They were worried about unforeseen problems arising during mass production.

Before using Instrumental Dev, the only visibility Withings had into their assembly line came from sending engineers to the factory and hoping they would be in the right place at the right time to catch issues. Even when they did discover defects, it was difficult to figure out the root cause because of the inefficiency of today's failure analysis processes.

“In past builds we let some defects through NPI and fixed it in MP for speed, but with Instrumental we were able to detect and fix problems a lot faster in NPI, so we had a much smoother MP build.” — Francois Vailland, Industrialization Team Leader, Withings

The Withings team implemented Instrumental Dev at a key point in their new product’s development and used it to inspect more than 10,000 units, with tests set up to monitor 12 regions. By automating defect discovery and streamlining failure analysis, Withings was able to speed through DVT and work through mass production headache-free. The data and analysis tools housed in Instrumental’s software empowered the Withings team to correct issues before they turned into bigger problems. They used Instrumental Dev to discover issues like inverted wires, crushed microphones, and missing foam, and used Instrumental Dev’s Monitor feature to keep track of problematic regions.

Thanks to Instrumental Dev, Withings’ team was able to get through DVT and mass production quickly and smoothly, all while upholding the high quality standard their customers were accustomed to, even with a brand new product.

Instrumental's tools help hardware teams catch defects early during development and transition seamlessly into production. Get a demo today!